So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked.
This is probably the single funniest bit in your backstory.
No.
It reads like a scene from The Big Bang Theory, and it is difficult to imagine that anyone would ever actually do that - till I remember doing similarly bad+stupid things.
People who get dumped want to know their partners' reasons for breaking up, not the biological etiology of those reasons. They are very likely to take lengthy discourses into the latter as insensitive, obfuscatory deflections (and probably correctly so).
They are very likely to take lengthy discourses into the latter as insensitive, obfuscatory deflections (and probably correctly so).
I would call the 'real reasons' typically given to be obfuscatory deflections. People seldom know the actual reasons for why they want to break up. More often they are explicitly aware of one of the downstream effects of the actual reason.
Which is not to say that descriptions of the biological eitology are not also obfuscatory deflections. Most answers to this question will be! In fact, answers to this question will usually be obfuscatory deflections because not to do so will necessarily be 'insensitive'.
Another reason for not giving the real reasons is that sorting that kind of thing out is work and telling the truth about oneself is an offer of intimacy. If you're breaking up with someone, you may not want to do either one.
I would call the 'real reasons' typically given to be obfuscatory deflections. People seldom know the actual reasons for why they want to break up. More often they are explicitly aware of one of the downstream effects of the actual reason.
I'm sure that's the case. But my point was that if the real reason for the break-up was "I want to be with someone who possesses quality X that you lack," then tacking on "...because evolution made me that way" does not render the reason more real or add an additional, separate reason; it just renders the one reason better explained in a mostly irrelevant way.
It makes the reason much more of an attack-- it's not just "I find [feature] unattractive", it's "people in general are likely to find [feature] unattractive, and this is to the advantage of the human race".
Examining what Lukeprog wrote...
Before long, Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. By then I knew I couldn't give her what she wanted: marriage.
So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty.....
...his stated reason doesn't appear to match the paragraph that preceded it all (I realize that we are probably gettting a very condensed version of the conversation, but hopefully it didn't elide something this important).
Were I in the lady's position, I'd wonder why I only became physically unsuitable after I started seeking a legally recognized commitment. Unless the feature Lukeprog found unattractive was "wants committed pair-bonding," the explanation does not appear to fit the circumstances at all. This doesn't seem like a case of someone unable to deal with "radical honesty;" it seems like a case of someone being pissed off at what comes across as dishonesty.
The real harm, in my eyes, is because she will likely generalize that because evolution made you that way it made all men that way, which is likely not true. Actually it's patently untrue for any example I can think of.
I wouldn't expect lukeprog to bring up evolution in that context unless he believed that most men were like him.
Well it's almost definitional. If evolutionary selection pressures were extreme enough to actually make lukeprog that way, then all men are that way.
This does not follow. There are many species where different members have evolved different mating strategies. For a really neat example see this lizard. Males have evolved three different strategies that are in a rock-paper-scissors relationship to each other.
I would think that her thinking would be that if evolution made lukeprog not like me because of xyz, then it would make all men not like me because of that. I must not be a likeable person.
That would be bad.
Luke will never be able to break up with any future girlfriends because it would require too many preliminaries before he could even start the sequence which would explain why they should break up.
...says the only person who required more buildup to discuss metaethics than I did.
I have not tired of these jokes, but: actually, 'breaking up' rationalist-to-rationalist is pretty easy and painless in my (limited) experience.
I'm sure that's the case. But my point was that if the real reason for the break-up was "I want to be with someone who possesses quality X that you lack," then tacking on "...because evolution made me that way" does not render the reason more real or add an additional, separate reason; it just renders the one reason better explained in a mostly irrelevant way.
It is rather irrelevant. Even crockers rules doesn't take you as far as giving evolutionary psychology explanations. So saying "because you have small breasts" is grossly insensitive and saying "because you have small breasts and I am biologically ... signalling ... etc" is grossly insensitive and also irrelevant, nerdy and kind of awkward.
Agreed that the ev-psych was bad. But...
If your true and actual reason for breaking up with someone is that her breasts are too small, consider that (a) saying "It was because you were too clingy" may cause them to try and mess with an aspect of their personality that doesn't even need fixing, and (b) total silence, which you may fondly imagine to be mercy, may result in her frantically imagining dozens of possible flaws all of which she tries desperately to correct, just on the off-chance it was that one. As opposed to, say, looking for a guy who's into smaller breasts next time.
Maybe I'm just being inordinately naive, but telling someone honestly, softly, and believably, your true reason for rejecting them, seems like it really should have certain advantages for them, if not for you. I mean, compared to either silence or lying. Calling it "grossly insensitive" is too quick a rejection of the possibility of telling a truth.
I think you're assuming too rational a partner.
If you're honest and say, "Your breasts are too small," the person in question might seek a guy who likes smaller breasts next time. Or she might fall into a deep self-loathing in which she believes that her body is imperfect and nobody could be attracted to her, thus sabotaging her own future potential relationships. Or she could run out and get breast implants, even though she doesn't really want them, in hopes that you / other future guys will find her more attractive--which is much more expensive and possibly less rewarding than simply finding people who like small breasts.
In my view it's better to keep it vague. Guessing over dozens of possible flaws is likely to be less harmful than obsessing over one particular flaw, since it's difficult to figure out / change whatever possible flaw you think may exist.
(Disclosure: I have been dumped once and did the dumping once. The dumper kept it vague; I kept it specific but lied. I can't judge how keeping it specific while lying worked, since the person in question was bipolar and therefore not at all a normal test subject. I can judge how keeping it vague went: I obsessed over dozens of flaws for a while, until I found other people who were interested, at which point I decided it was probably just a bad match and nothing really to do with absolute flaws at all. I do not know how a completely honest dumping pans out.)
true reason for rejecting them
This usually makes little sense, particularly for someone one was attracted to for a while.
It's almost never true that for someone whose breasts one once found sufficient, her breasts would be a deal breaker, and no woman would be attractive with similar breasts regardless of her personality, face, legs, etc.
The problem is that the character sheet was filled out with mostly low die rolls, not that stat X is too low.
ETA: asking what the "true reason" for a breakup was is like asking what the "true reason" for a war, such as the Iraq War, was. Was it possible WMD? Past links to Al-Qaida? Possible future links to Al-Qaida? Past human rights abuses such as mass torture and murder? Aquiring influence over oil? Creating a pro-western regime? Creating a democratic regime? Perceived divine guidance during Bush's praying?
The first test to figure out if someone is more rationalist than emotional about the Iraq war to ask them what the "true reason" for the invasion was and see if they right that wrong question. It's just as much the wrong question in this context as that one.
Calling it "grossly insensitive" is too quick a rejection of the possibility of telling a truth.
I agree.
You really ought to get yourself an anonymous alter-identity so you aren't tempted to discuss things like this under your real name. I believe that you in particular should avoid this topic when writing on public forums.
I'm curious as to why me in particular, but I'm happy to hear from you privately. In general, I go with radical transparency. I think that the truth is that so long as you don't show shame, guilt or malice you win. Summers screwed up by accepting that his thoughts were shameful and then asserting that they were forced by reason and that others were so forced as well. This is both low-status and aggressive, a bad combination and a classic nerdy failure mode.
Digression into a bunch of theory and science impersonalizes things as well as focussing on 'me' instead of 'you'
Not really. Any evolutionary explanation of why I am repulsed by your physical appearance is going to spend a lot of time dwelling on your physical appearance. And I think the impersonalization bit is the key - it is a ridiculously impersonal digression at a moment of extreme emotional vulnerability on the other person's part. Most people will interpret impersonal explanations of this sort of emotionally impactful decision as an extremely cold-hearted way of excusing oneself. "I'm sorry I've just hurt your feelings. But allow me to explain how this is all just the work of the forces of sexual selection in our ancestral environment..."
I find it a bit amusing that for all the theorizing about why this was taken so badly, nobody seems to have mentioned the most obvious one. That is, while most people do want to know why you're breaking up with them, very few will appreciate somebody rambling on for 20 pages worth about all the things that are wrong with you. This would be true even if there had been no ev-psych content at all. ("Here are all the things about you that annoy me. First, you have small breasts. Second, you pick your nose. Third, you prefer Star Trek: Deep Space Nine above Star Trek: The Next Generation...)
I'm willing to bet a small amount that it wasn't an hour's worth of listing different reasons for why lukeprog was breaking up with her.
It was one or a small number of reasons for the breakup, and the rest was explaining about evolutionary psychology and possibly some time spent on footnotes.
Explaining her flaws in such a scientific, matter-of-fact way shows how emotionally distant he was. She probably felt like the guy she loved just dropped off an eviction notice.
Beware! Crocker's Rules is about being able to receive information as fast as possible, not to transmit it!
From Radical Honesty:
Crocker's Rules didn't give you the right to say anything offensive, but other people could say potentially offensive things to you, and it was your responsibility not to be offended. This was surprisingly hard to explain to people; many people would read the careful explanation and hear, "Crocker's Rules mean you can say offensive things to other people."
From wiki.lw:
In contrast to radical honesty, Crocker's rules encourage being tactful with anyone who hasn't specifically accepted them. This follows the general principle of being "liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send".
If you read books on communication such as How to Win Friends and Influence People, the authors go on about how just "saying what you think" is pretty much the worst strategy you can use. Not just for your own sake but for the purpose of actually convincing the other party of what you're trying to tell them. Unless they're explicitly running by Crocker's Rules and ready to squash their natural reaction to your words, it probably won't work.
No, it was in a car, and I had written it up in a 20-page document I printed off, but then I recited it from memory anyway. I'm kinda glad I don't have that document anymore.
This is the exact reverse, in every way, of Erin collaborating with a friend of hers to write up an elaborate argument tree for the job of persuading me that she ought to be my girlfriend, which she ended up not actually needing to use.
She also doesn't have that document any more. I so wanted to see it...
grin that was fun, and incidentally how I first found out about you (Eliezer). I don't remember actually formally writing said document though, so much as just reasoning out the pro/cons of various approaches.
I'm glad it worked out though! :)
I'm picturing it with an impressive array of references at the end, and side remarks on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarsip.
Wow! A 20 page essay on "why I'm breaking up with you"? That's just... brutal!
And obviously the title should have been:
"In Which I Explain How Natural Selection Has Built Me To Be Attracted To Certain Features That You Lack"
:D
I'd expect that people who are okay with breakups are fairly rare, regardless of the method...
Luke, I’ve seen you and others mention the fashion stuff positively quite a few times, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything of substance about it.
Is it something that can only be imparted in a bootcamp, or can you convey parts of it in a blog post (not necessarily on LessWrong)? Since most readers won’t go to a bootcamp anytime soon, even if a text is less effective per person the aggregate benefits of such a post are likely higher. Or did I miss a link somewhere?
(I did encounter lots of fashion advice on the net, but I didn’t quite get it; I’m asking you about it because I vaguely remember seeing comments of (at least one) bootcamp participant who mentioned a similar problem but who did benefit from (what I assume were) your lessons.)
I think that the picture detracts from the article. It's a deviation from most other LW pages, heteronormatizes the content, and in addition since the in-picture and out-of-picture background is white, the people look like cutouts in this really awkward way.
Yes. The image also makes the post look like some random "science finds: X!" journalism, and that's not a good thing.
heteronormatizes the content
Seems to reflect the content reasonably well actually, since it's a man reflecting on his experience with women...
As Kevin said,
You aren't the target audience for the stock photo, it's a random person seeing Less Wrong for the first time. People like pictures.
As for the picture heteronormatizing the content... it's an explicitly hetero story, because it's my story. Don't you think it'd be weird to have a homosexual couple in the lead photo for my story?
People indeed like pictures- but stock photos on articles about romance and relationships pattern match to really awful websites.
Would an actual photo of Luke and Alice be better?
Now I'm imagining a picture of Luke with a redacted silhouette of a woman entitled "woman I am not attracted to any more". There are arrows pointing to various lacking physical attributes lacking from an evolutionary psychology perspective, complete with sketches of what they should look like... Perhaps with a supplemental craziness vs hotness chart or two.
Good article, but after comparing it with the drafts, it comes across as a little... weakened?
Politics, religion, math, and programming are basically never the right subject matter when flirting.
I wonder why you ended up removing that line. Granted, I'd say "rarely" or "unlikely to be" rather than "never", but still, it looks like a useful pointer (or at least reminder), especially given the kind of crowd we have here.
If it's an observation based on repeated experiment, you should say it. If knowing this helped you optimise your strategies, you should say it. Or did you end up thinking that it's actually untrue?
Instead of saying "Women want..." and "Women mean..." would it not be more accurate to say "Some women want.../mean..., and those are the kind of women I wanted to seek, so this knowledge was useful to me."? Also, did your studying convincingly impart that these general desires were gender specific, or would it be more accurate to say "Some people want.../mean"?
Instead of saying "Women want..." and "Women mean..." would it not be more accurate to say "Some women want.../mean...,
I am troubled by the vehemence by which people seem to reject the notion of using the language of the second-order simulacrum -- especially in communities that should be intimately aware of the concept that the map is not the territory.
Some forms of accuracy are simply wastes of space; how many digits of Pi does rational!Harry know, as compared to rational!Hermione?
I am troubled by the vehemence by which people seem to reject the notion of using the language of the second-order simulacrum -- especially in communities that should be intimately aware of the concept that the map is not the territory.
Understanding signaling in communication is almost as basic as understanding the difference between the map and the territory.
A choice of words always contains an element of signaling. Generalizing statements are not always made in order to describe the territory with a simpler map, they are also made in order to signal that the exceptions from the general case are not worth mentioning. This element of signaling is also present, even if the generalization is made out of a simple desire to not "waste space" - indeed the exceptional cases were not mentioned! Thus a sweeping generalization is evidence for the proposition that the speaker doesn't consider the exceptions to the stated general rule worth much (an upper bound is the trouble of mentioning them). And when dealing with matters of personal identity, not all explanations for the small worth of the set of exceptional people are as charitable as a supposedly small size of the set.
A statement like "Women want {thing}" leaves it unclear what the map is even supposed to be, barring clear context cues. This can lead to either fake disagreements or fake agreements.
Fake disagreements ("You said that Republicans are against gun control, but I know some who aren't!") are not too dangerous, I think. X makes the generalization, Y points out the exception, X says that it was a broad generalization, Y asks for more clarity in the future, X says Y was not being sufficiently charitable, and so on. Annoying to watch, but not likely to generate bad ideas.
Fake agreements can lead to deeper confusion. If X seriously believes that 99% of women have some property, and Y believes that only 80% of women have some property, then they may both agree with the generalization even if they have completely different ideas about what a charitable reading would be!
It costs next to nothing to say "With very few exceptions, women...", "A strong majority of women...." or "Most women...." The three statements mean different things, and establishing the meaning does not make communication next-to-impossible; it makes communication clearer. This isn't about charity, but clarity.
The point is that I'm concerned not with charity nor with clarity, but rather with sufficiency to the current medium. Each of those little "costs next to nothing" statements actually do have a cost, one that isn't necessarily clear initially.
Not adding those statements also has a cost.
in other words, the difference between 99% and 80% of women is below the threshold of significance.
Honestly, you don't know how many potential rationalists may find a post seemingly making unchallenged sweeping generalizations about women, and decide that these so-called rationalists are just a group of bigoted idiots that are less rational than your average person-in-the-street.
It's okay for someone to to say that pi is "3.14" if the other person knows that you know in reality it has more digits than that, and you're just being sufficient for your purposes. In short if there's actual transparency, not a double illusion of such.
But if they don't know that, if every post of yours may be perceived as an indication of complete positions (not hasty approximations thereof), it costs less to do things like say "most women" instead of "women" (or add a general disclaimer at the beginning) rather than not do it.
When someone adds that proviso "asexual/homosexual" -- they are changing the relevant level of precision necessary to the conversation.
No, they are pointing out that in order to apply to a case they are interested in, the conversation must be made more precise.
For example; if I say "Men and women get married because they love each other", then the fact that some men/women don't marry, or the fact that intersex people aren't necessarily men or women, or the fact that GLBT people who marry are also likely to do so because of love, or the fact that some marriages are loveless is only a distraction to the conversation at hand.
The last one isn't a distraction, it's a counterexample. If you want to meaningfully say that men and women marry out of love, you must implicitly claim that loveless marriages are a small minority. If someone says, "A significant number of of marriages are loveless," they aren't trying to get you to add a trivializing proviso. They're saying that your generalization is false.
...Consider the difference in meaning between "Men and women marry each other because they love each other" and "Men/women/intersex individu
I'm hoping I can butt in and explain all this.
Logos01 probably shouldn't have brought up Baudrillard, who is among the sloppiest and most obscure thinkers of the last century. Baudrillard's model of abstraction is pretty terrible. Much better to user analytic philosophy's terminology rather than post-structuralism's terminology. In analytic philosophy we talk about abstract objects, "types" or "kinds". These are ubiquitous, not especially mysterious, and utterly essential to the representation of knowledge. "Electron", "Homo sapiens", "the combustion engine", "Mozart's 10th Symphony", "the Human Genome", etc. To map without abstract objects one would have to speak only of particulars and extensionally defined sets. And that's just the nouns-- whether one can even use verbs without recourse to abstraction is another issue entirely. Open up any scientific journal article and you will see named entities which are abstract objects. There are schools of thought that hold that kinds can ultimately be reduced to classes determined only by resemblance or predicate-- in an attempt to dissolve the supposed mystery of wh...
For example; if I say "Men and women get married because they love each other",
Oooh, perfect example! Because this is probably still not true for a plurality, if not majority of humanity, and it used to be little more than a perk if it occurred in a marriage. For most of human history and for much of humanity today, marriage is more like a business relationship, corporate merger, pragmatic economic decision...
If you confine your statement to Westerners, and especially middle-to-upper class ones, and those who live in societies strongly modelled on the same pattern (urban Chinese often yes; rural Chinese often no) then you are dealing with an acceptable level of accurate to be relatively unobjectionable.
Do you want to try again?
The fact is that there are a lot people who do think "women/men want" when they hear someone saying "women/men want", and don't understand that these aren't just statistical trends. And I'm pretty sure that this ends up causing considerable damage. We should whatever we can to avoid strenghtening such views.
And while you may be right that the average commenter will recognize the difference even without it being explicitly stated, I wouldn't be so sure about the average reader. Note that lukeprog has stated that the article is also aimed towards people who don't usually read LW. A random person who gets the link to this article from his Facebook feed is a lot more likely to take such claims literally than someone who has read through every post on LW.
Also, I do feel like there are tendencies towards such over-generalization even among active LW commenters. For instance, there was one case of a commenter acting condescendingly towards people he thought were carrying out preferences that were suboptimal for their sex. (Or so my memory claims: when I went to look up the details, I noticed that the relevant comments had been deleted, so I can only link to my rebuttal.)
The conscious or subconscious decision to read "women/men want" as "women/men all want" rather than "women/men generally want" is a mental step, just as the conscious or subconscious decision to read "women/men want" as "women/men generally want" rather than "women/men all want" is a step.
It's not obviously the default to read "women/men want" as "women/men all want".
In this context, to do so is a) obviously wrong to me, b) actually wrong according to the intent of the author and c) would result in the author saying something stupid rather than arguably true.
A critical reading skill is to read charitably such that the author is not saying something stupid, and I have trouble sympathizing with what I see as an abandonment of that duty by readers or commenters excusing and/or justifying that.
If I say in passing "men are taller than women", I hope I don't get assailed by people pointing out that at maturity, many women are taller than many men, or that men start as babies less than a foot or so tall, at which point almost every female is taller than they are*.
*And when I say "almost every fe...
But this presumes that the reader does already realize that a claim of the type "all men want x" (or even "the overwhelming majority of men want x") is stupid, while my point was that for many people, "all men want x" is a perfectly reasonable claim.
Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...
And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.
Later she explained: "You have my heart now, Luke."
I felt proud, but even Luke2005 also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because Alice hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?
This is an account of some lessons in rationality that I learned during my journeys in romance.* I haven't been very rational in my relationships until recently, but in retrospect I learned a fair bit about rationality from the failures resulting from my irrationality in past relationships.
Early lessons included realizations like the one above — that I wasn't happy with the standard cultural scripts. I hadn't really noticed the cultural scripts up until that point. I was a victim of cached thoughts and a cached self.
Rationality Lesson: Until you explicitly notice the cached rules for what you're doing, you won't start thinking of them as something to be optimized. Ask yourself: Which parts of romance do you currently think of as subjects of optimization? What else should you be optimizing?
Gather data
At the time, I didn't know how to optimize. I decided I needed data. How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work? The value of information was high, so I decided to become a social psychology nerd. I began to spend less time with Alice so I could spend more time studying.
This wasn't easy. She and I had connected in some pretty intimate ways, including a simultaneous deconversion from fundamentalist Christianity. But in the end my studies paid off. Moreover, my studies in personality and relationship styles helped me to realize that I (and therefore she) would have been miserable if I had decided to pursue marriage with her (or anyone at the time). Now that is valuable information to have!
Rationality Lesson: Respond to the value of information. Once you notice you might be running in the wrong direction, don't keep going that way just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in the thoughts or information you've now realized is valuable because it might change your policies, i.e., figuring out which direction to go.
Sanity-check yourself
Before long, Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. By then I knew I couldn't give her what she wanted: marriage.
So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty. Now I realize that there's hardly a more damaging way to break up with someone. She asked that I kindly never speak to her again, and I can't blame her.
This gives you some idea of just how incompetent I was, at the time. I had some idea of how incompetent I was, but not enough of one to avoid badly wounding somebody I loved.
Rationality Lesson: Know your fields of incompetence. If you suspect you may be incompetent, sanity-check yourself by asking others for advice, or by Googling. (E.g. "how to break up with your girlfriend nicely", or "how to not die on a motorcycle" or whatever.)
Study
During the next couple years, I spent no time in (what would have been) sub-par relationships, and instead invested that time optimizing for better relationships in the future. Which meant I was celibate.
Neither Intimate Relationships nor Handbook of Relationship Initiation existed at the time, but I still learned quite a bit from books like The Red Queen and The Moral Animal. I experienced a long series of 'Aha!' moments, like:
Within a few months, I had more dating-relevant head knowledge than any guy I knew.
Lesson: Use scholarship. Especially if you can do it efficiently, scholarship is a quick and cheap way to gain a certain class of experience points.
Just try it / just test yourself
Scholarship was warm and comfy, so I stayed in scholar mode for too long. I hit diminishing returns in what books could teach me. Every book on dating skills told me to go talk to women, but I thought I needed a completed decision tree first: What if she does this? What if she says that? I won't know what to do if I don't have a plan! I should read 10 more books, so I know how to handle every contingency.
The dating books told me I would think that, but I told myself I was unusually analytical, and could actually benefit from completing the decision tree in advance of actually talking to women.
The dating books told me I would think that, too, and that it was just a rationalization. Really, I was just nervous about the blows my ego would receive from newbie mistakes.
Rationality Lesson: Be especially suspicious of rationalizations for not obeying the empiricist rules "try it and see what happens" or "test yourself to see what happens" or "get some concrete experience on the ground". Think of the cost of time happening as a result of rationalizing. Consider the opportunities you are missing if you don't just realize you're wrong right now and change course. How many months or years will your life be less awesome as a result? How many opportunities will you miss while you're still (kinda) young?
Use science, and maybe drugs
The dating books told me to swallow my fear and talk to women. I couldn't swallow my fear, so I tried swallowing brandy instead. That worked.
So I went out and talked to women, mostly at coffee shops or on the street. I learned all kinds of interesting details I hadn't learned in the books about what makes an interaction fun for most women:
After a while, I could talk to women even without the brandy. And a little after that, I had my first one-night stand, which was great because it was exactly what she and I wanted.
But as time passed I was surprised by how much I didn't enjoy casual flings. I didn't feel engaged when I didn't know and didn't have much in common with the girl in my bed. I had gone in thinking all I wanted was sex, but it turned out that I wanted connection to another person. (And sex.)
Rationality Lesson: Use empiricism and do-it-yourself science. Just try things. No, seriously.
Self-modify to succeed
By this time my misgivings about the idea of "owning" another's sexuality had led me to adopt a polyamorous mindset for myself. (I saw many other people apparently happy with monogamy, but it wasn't for me.) But if I was going to be polyamorous, I needed to deprogram my sexual jealousy, which sounded daunting. Sexual jealousy was hard-wired into me by evolution, right?
It turned out to be easier than I had predicted. Tactics that helped me destroy my capacity for sexual jealousy include:
This lack of sexual jealousy came in handy when I later dated a polyamorous girl who was already dating two of my friends.
Rationality Lesson: Have a sense that more is possible. Know that you haven't yet reached the limits of self-modification. Try things. Let your map of what is possible be constrained by evidence, not by popular opinion.
Finale
There might have been a learning curve, but by golly, at the end of all that DIY science and rationality training and scholarship I'm much more romantically capable, I'm free to take up relationships when I want, I know fashion well enough to teach it at rationality camps, and I can build rapport with almost anyone. My hair looks good and I'm happy.
If you're a nerd-at-heart like me, I highly recommend becoming a nerd about romance, so long as you read the right nerd books and you know the nerd rule about being empirical. Rationality is for winning.
* My thanks to everyone who commented on earlier drafts of this post. Here are the biggest changes I made: